How you can manage your AWS EBS Snapshots?

Fault tolerance is defined as a property which enables a system to function properly in case a fault or multiple faults have occurred in one or more than one components of the system. The concept of fault tolerance the remains same as far as cloud computing is concerned. It is recommended to follow certain best practices related to your EBS volumes as they are directly associated with your EC2 instances. Managing your AWS EBS snapshots provide high availability and reliability to your cloud infrastructure.

To know more about elastic block store (EBS), read here.

Why it is important to take care of AWS EBS snapshot age?

AWS EBS Snapshot refers to a backup which is created to store data present in EBS volumes in AWS S3. Proper storage and having multiple copies of data play a significant role in data recovery and protection. Therefore, it is very important to frequently update EBS snapshots, so as to ensure that data can be adequately restored if necessary. Storing Amazon EBS snapshots in S3 is important due to the fact that Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) are based on separate infrastructures. Chances are that any failure that may occur will cover one and not both infrastructures. If something happens to the volume, the snapshots in S3 will most likely be alright which will provide backup of data lost in EBS volume.

Such recovery drills and practices should be conducted regularly and not in a real data-loss scenario. You would want to make sure that the environment in which your recovery operations run will bring your service back up, and keep it running and updating data as usual.

How does Centilytics solve your problem?

Centilytics provides users with a dedicated insight which shows the status of your EBS snapshots in form of snapshot age. With the help of this insight, the user can easily track down which snapshot is how many days old and based on the relevance of data, snapshots can be taken according to the preferred regularity from the AWS console.

Insight Description:

Severity:

There can be 3 possible scenarios-

Severity

Description

OK

The most recent snapshot of respective EBS volumes was created less than 7 days ago.

WARNING

Age of the most recently created snapshot is between 7-30 days.

CRITICAL

Either age of the most recently created snapshot is more than 30 days OR the respective EBS volumes has no snapshot.

Description of further columns are as follows:

1.Account id: Shows the respective account ID of user’s account.

Account Name: Shows corresponding account name to the user’s account.

Region: Shows the region in which EBS volume exists.

Identifier: Shows the unique volume Id of the EBS volume.

Volume State: Shows the status of the respective EBS volume i.e. whether the volume is in use or not.

Creation Date: Shows the date on which the snapshot.

Snapshot Age: Shows the age of the most recent snapshot.

Filters applicable:

Filter Name

Description

Account Id

Applying the account Id filter will display data for the selected account Id.

Applying severity filter will display public snapshots according to the selected severity type i.e. selecting critical will display all resources with critical severity. Same will be the case for Warning and Ok severity types.

Resource Tags

Applying resource tags filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag. For eg- If the user has tagged any resource using a tag named environment, then selecting an environment from the resource tags filter will display all the data accordingly

Resource Tags Value

Applying resource tags value filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag value. For eg- If the user has tagged some resource by a tag named environment and has given it a value say production (environment:production), the user will be able to view data of all the resources which are tagged as “environment:production”. User can use the tag value filter only when a tag name has been provided.